And so it was a tragic world into which this boy Page had been born.  He was ten years old when the Civil War came to an end, and his early life was therefore cast in a desolate country.  Like all of his neighbours, Frank Page had been ruined by the war.  Both the Southern and Northern armies had passed over the Page territory; compared with the military depredations with which Page became familiar in the last years of his life, the Federal troops did not particularly misbehave, the attacks on hen roosts and the destruction of feather beds representing the extreme of their “atrocities”; but no country can entertain two great fighting forces without feeling the effects for a prolonged period.  Life in this part of North Carolina again became reduced to its fundamentals.  The old homesteads and the Negro huts were still left standing, and their interiors were for the most part unharmed, but nearly everything else had disappeared.  Horses, cattle, hogs, livestock of all kinds had vanished before the advancing hosts of hungry soldiers; and there was one thing which was even more a rarity than these.  That was money.  Confederate veterans went around in their faded gray uniforms, not only because they loved them, but because they did not have the wherewithal to buy new wardrobes.  Judges, planters, and other dignified members of the community became hack drivers from the necessity of picking up a few small coins.  Page’s father was more fortunate than the rest, for he had one asset with which to accumulate a little liquid capital; he possessed a fine peach orchard, which was particularly productive in the summer of 1865, and the Northern soldiers, who drew their pay in money that had real value, developed a weakness for the fruit.  Walter Page, a boy of ten, used to take his peaches to Raleigh, and sell them to the “invader”; although he still disdained having companionable relations with the enemy, he was not above meeting them on a business footing; and the greenbacks and silver coin obtained in this way laid a new basis for the family fortunes.

Despite this happy windfall, life for the next few years proved an arduous affair.  The horrors of reconstruction which followed the war were more agonizing than the war itself.  Page’s keenest enthusiasm in after life was democracy, in its several manifestations; but the form in which democracy first unrolled before his astonished eyes was a phase that could hardly inspire much enthusiasm.  Misguided sentimentalists and more malicious politicians in the North had suddenly endowed the Negro with the ballot.  In practically all Southern States that meant government by Negroes—­or what was even worse, government by a combination of Negroes and the most vicious white elements, including that which was native to the soil and that which had imported itself from the North for this particular purpose.  Thus the political vocabulary of Page’s formative years consisted chiefly of such words as “scalawag,” “carpet bagger,”